As a former reporter, this is exactly what we lived forâ€”conflict. In a world without ideological bias, the news media would be asking all those Democrats on their pilgrammage to their liberal promised land, "YearlyKos" their opinions about the positive military progress in Iraq. Even the Chicago Tribune's Swamp, at the end of the day yesterday, acknowledged that the op-ed by liberal Brookings Institution scholars Michael O'Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack was bound to throw a hand grenade into conventional wisdom in Washington.

Congressional Democrats and Democratic presidential candidates who are arguing for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq will have to contend with an op-ed piece in the New York Times that has gotten a lot of attention in Washington today and will for weeks to come.

The piece about Iraq is headlined "A War We Just Might Win" and it was the equivalent of kicking the legs out from under the anti-Iraq war faction within the Democratic establishment by two people within that very establishment.

Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration's miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily "victory" but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.

After the furnace-like heat, the first thing you notice when you land in Baghdad is the morale of our troops. In previous trips to Iraq we often found American troops angry and frustrated â€” many sensed they had the wrong strategy, were using the wrong tactics and were risking their lives in pursuit of an approach that could not work.

Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference.

Will the news media press Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Dick Durbin, et. al, for their reactions to not only the op-ed piece but observations from the New York Times' John Burns and others that the surge is working. After all, all those politicians declared that the surge was futile and our further involvement in Iraq is a mistake. What do they say now? Will the media allow them to get away with their shop worn cliches such as, "We shouldn't be intervening in a sectarian civil war?" As anybody who has been following the progress in Iraq will note, al Qaeda has been trying to provoke a civil war and our focus on the instigators has turned the war effort around.

Just today, Markos continues to promote our retreat from Iraq at the same time our troops are defeating our enemies.

The Democrats' unprecedented proclamation of defeat and retreat in the midst of a winnable war is of historical note. Will they be held responsible? The YearlyKos is the perfect test case of whether the MSM is composed of impartial journalists or pr agents for liberal rock star Markos. The media flunked the test last year. It has a chance to redeem itself in a few days. We'll be watching.